That little look down bends your spine and triggers your stomach to do a little crunch. “You’ve already started to bend incorrectly — at your waist,” Couch says. “Almost everyone in the U.S. bends at the stomach.”

In the process, our backs curve into the letter “C” — or, as Couch says, “We all look like really folded cashews.”

In other words, when we bend over in the U.S., most of us look like nuts!But in many parts of the world, people don’t look like cashews when they bend over. Instead, you see something very different.

Like this:

If you’ve ever filled out a form SF-86 for a U.S. government security clearance, you’ll know the hassle of dealing with the sheer volume of information it entails. Listing contacts, personal, financial, and travel information in enormous, painstaking detail isn’t trivial, and even small errors will get the form kicked back to you or your clearance rejected. Applicants are required to spell out in great detail the specifics of foreign travel and overseas contacts. Investigators need to know where you’ve made your money and to whom you have debts.

I did it in my early twenties when my life was relatively uncomplicated, and it was still a pain in the ass. It’s not easy, and it’s not supposed to be.

It’s even harder when you’re a corrupt, entitled snake who repeatedly lies about your finances to federal investigators and serves as a living, breathing poster child for privileged venality. It’s even harder when you’ve rather clumsily attempted to use both your familial relationship and proximity to the president of the United States to save your family’s failing real-estate empire.

All of which helps explain Jared Kushner’s very bad day on Tuesday. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a man who has compromised himself and his supposed values to accommodate and indulge President Trumphausen’s various whims, impulses, urges, feuds, and paranoid episodes, finally drew the line and busted Kushner’s security clearance down from TS/SCI to Walmart Greeter Background Check (Provisional).

Like this:

I’m a little skeptical that a standing desk could be worse for you than sitting on your ass all day. I’m certainly not going to take as gospel a study with a mere 20 participants in it. As for the Canadian study, I have my doubts, too, but need to delve further into the science.

Often I think these studies are driven by the disdain that Sitters often show towards Standers. Desk discrimination is what it is.

There’s always that one person in the office—you know the one. The one with the standing desk. Whenever you happen to pass their cube you think, wow, there’s a person being proactive about their health. There’s someone fighting the good fight against modern society’s unavoidably sedentary lifestyle. Good on them, bad on me.

But is that really true? A growing body of evidence suggests that yes, sitting for long periods of time can have a detrimental effect on your health. But unfortunately, standing for large spans of the day isn’t that great either. And a recent study adds to this pile. This month in the journal Ergonomics, researchers report that when they had 20 participants stand for two hours at a time, subjects showed an apparent increase in lower limb swelling and decreased mental state.

Imagine a cutting-edge industry that’s all about pushing boundaries, finding solutions to problems that never existed and “disrupting” absolutely everything we’ve come to rely on with a cast-iron belief in better-life-through-technology. Now, imagine them just “sitting around a big table with a lot of coffee, and talking about it.”

It’s not exactly an image of action, is it? No matter what the “it” is.

And yet that’s precisely the way Constantin Constantinides describes the satellite industry today. Constantinides is a radio frequency engineer with a satellite company in Glasgow called Alba Orbital. And the “it” refers to … cyber security.

Cyber security is one of the biggest unsolved challenges we have on Earth, and it’s about to become a far larger challenge in space.

You could say, “Well, at least they are talking about it.” At least cyber security is on the new space agenda. And it had certainly better be, because the more satellites we fire up into space, and the more those satellites form huge constellations, the more we rely on the data they accrue — the communications networks, location services, Earth Observation, shipping, flight and freak weather tracking, plus masses of unimagined stuff.

Like this:

As my family and I strolled our neighborhood at sunset, my eagle-eyed son spotted a light in the sky sliding slowly away from us before fading. At first we thought it was the International Space Station (ISS) but it was too dim for that. We decided it was a low-earth orbit satellite and the conversation shifted to SpaceX’s recent launch of two low-earth-orbit test satellites for their proposed satellite Internet service, Starlink.

I have no idea whether the satellite we watched is a Starlink Satellite (more formally called TinTin A & B and previously known as Microsat 2A and 2B). I didn’t have my satellite tracking app fired up on my phone at the time. It did get me thinking, though, that it would be fun to track the TinTin satellites to see what I could discover.

A search on the Internet reveals very little information about these birds. I have not yet found the two-line elements (TLE) which describe their orbits. They haven’t been mentioned on my satellite-tracking email list, either.

What if I could locate them, then what? I’d like to try to collect whatever telemetry is being broadcast, even if it’s just beeps. Better yet, I could capture the data stream from the Internet side but that would be challenging to do anything with as it’s said to be encrypted. The birds do have imagery capability. What if I could tune into that and download an image snapped from orbit? Wouldn’t that be cool!Continue reading →

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This is a shocking, eye-opening look at the systemic racism in 1940s America. I had no idea this went on. On the bright side (and recognizing that we still have a lot of work to do) we have come a long way as a society.

It’s a little after 3pm in Detroit’s 8 Mile neighbourhood, and the cicadas are buzzing loudly in the trees. Children weave down the pavements on bicycles, while a pickup basketball game gets under way in a nearby park. The sky is a deep blue with only a hint of an approaching thunderstorm – in other words, a muggy, typical summer Sunday in Michigan’s largest city.

“8 Mile”, as the locals call it, is far from the much-touted economic “renaissance” taking place in Detroit’s centre. Tax delinquency and debt are still major issues, as they are in most places in the city. Crime and blight exist side by side with carefully trimmed hedgerows and mowed lawns, a patchwork that changes from block to block. In many ways it resembles every other blighted neighbourhood in the city – but with one significant difference. Hidden behind the oak-lined streets is an insidious piece of history that most Detroiters, let alone Americans, don’t even know exists: a half mile-long, 5ft tall concrete barrier that locals simply call “the wall”.

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I spent some time over the long President’s Day weekend hacking some of my home devices with the goal of putting new firmware on them. Up until now this has consisted mostly of flashing custom firmware through the existing upgrade channels of whatever device I was working with. Other times I would flash the devices by having them download new firmware from a fileserver.

Sometimes, though, there is no other way to bend a device to your will than to tap into the device’s serial console. This is often done by using a special adapter to convert the low-level signals into the kind that a modem would use. Then you simply use any suitable terminal program to interact with the device. Even though most embedded devices do not come with real computer screens, one can use the serial console to read messages and type commands.

My new serial cable arrives this week which should allow me to unlock nearly any device in my home. I’m looking forward to voiding some more warranties!